UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Feudal Obligation or Paid Service? The Recruitment of Princely Armies in the Late Medieval Low Countries Burgers, J.W.J.; Damen, M. DOI 10.1093/ehr/cey150 Publication date 2018 Document Version Final published version Published in English Historical Review License Article 25fa Dutch Copyright Act Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Burgers, J. W. J., & Damen, M. (2018). Feudal Obligation or Paid Service? The Recruitment of Princely Armies in the Late Medieval Low Countries. English Historical Review, 133(563), 777-805. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cey150 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:30 Sep 2021 English Historical Review Vol. CXXXIII No. 563 Advance Access publication June 23, 2018 © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/ehr/cey150 Feudal Obligation or Paid Service? The Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-abstract/133/563/777/5043263 by Universiteit van Amsterdam user on 08 January 2019 Recruitment of Princely Armies in the Late Medieval Low Countries* In 1338–9, Duke Jan III of Brabant (r. 1312–55) raised an army of more than 1,500 knights and squires to help Edward III of England (r. 1327–77) in his struggle to win the French Crown. The king paid him an enormous sum of money for his help; in the autumn of 1339, he owed the duke a staggering 307,000 Florentine florins.1 Edward’s first serious military campaign against Philip VI of France (r. 1328–50) was launched in September 1339 from the Brabantine town of Leuven, where the English king had established his headquarters.2 Duke Jan’s men, who supported King Edward, were primarily recruited from among the duke’s ‘own’ Brabantine vassals, although there were also men from neighbouring principalities, such as the counties of Loon, Mark, Namur and Hainaut. The duke paid them all, vassals as well as others, according to their military and social rank: knights received £6, whereas squires earned half that amount. The total costs for these men- at-arms amounted to some £6,200.3 The increasingly international character of warfare had a significant impact on the way kings and princes composed their armies. The traditional feudal host of the high Middle Ages, in which unpaid vassals served their lord because of their feudal oath, no longer met the needs of belligerent kings and princes. Scholars tend to agree that the * We would like to thank our colleagues both at the University of Amsterdam and at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the EHR for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1. H.S. Lucas, The Low Countries and the Hundred Years’ War, 1326–1347 (1929; repr. Philadelphia, PA, 1976), pp. 353–5. In July 1337 Edward III had already promised the duke £60,000 sterling in exchange for his loyalty and future collaboration: ibid., p. 215. See also S. Boffa, ‘The Duchy of Brabant. Caught between France and England: Geopolitics and Diplomacy during the First Half of the Hundred Years War’, in L.J.A. Villalon and D.J. Kagay, eds., The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus (Leiden, 2005), pp. 211–40. Throughout this article, we use many different coinages and so-called moneys of account (in pounds). Since it is impossible to standardise all these different currencies, we give the exact sums as mentioned in the sources. On monetary problems in medieval sources, see P. Spufford, Monetary Problems and Policies in the Burgundian Netherlands, 1433–1496 (Leiden, 1970), pp. 13–28. 2. Boffa, ‘Duchy of Brabant’, pp. 218–21. The names of the persons mentioned in the text are given in their original spelling, except for those of the French kings Philip IV the Fair and Philip VI, for which the accepted anglicised form is used. 3. Oeuvres de Froissart. Chroniques, ed. Baron [Joseph Marie] Kervyn de Lettenhove (25 vols. in 26, Brussels, 1867–77; repr. Osnabrück, 1967) [hereafter Chroniques], xx. 416–26. The number of combatants is based on this account: payments were made for 115 milites, 850 armigeri and 550 tam milites quam armigeri. See also Alphonse Wauters, ‘La Formation d’une armée brabançonne du temps du duc Jean III, de 1338 à 1339’, Compte rendue des séances de la Commission royale d’histoire, 5th ser., i (Brussels, 1891), pp. 192–205; S. Boffa, Warfare in Medieval Brabant (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 217–18. EHR, CXXXIII. 563 (August 2018) 778 FEUDAL OBLIGATION OR PAID SERVICE? alternative, the contract army in which professional soldiers fought for whomsoever would pay them, was still a phenomenon of the future. But the Brabantine example of 1338–9 demonstrates that the division Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-abstract/133/563/777/5043263 by Universiteit van Amsterdam user on 08 January 2019 between the two types of armed forces was not clear-cut. Instead, there was a transitional period in which both forms could occur at the same time, and in which the distinction between unpaid vassals and mercenaries was blurred. In this article, we examine this transition from feudal host to paid forces in the Low Countries during the fourteenth century. As early as the twelfth century, the princes of Holland, Brabant and Flanders were capable of mobilising armies of 500 to 1,000 mounted men- at-arms. In the fourteenth century these figures were substantially higher, ranging from 1,000 to 2,500.4 Although some princes had over 2,000 vassals and sub-vassals, it is unlikely that these men alone were capable of providing an armed force appropriate for a princely military campaign.5 We show that both the princes and the men who fought for them deployed various strategies and methods to cope with changing circumstances. Since there was no linear development from an army consisting of vassals to one of paid ‘retainers’, it is necessary to disentangle a wide range of feudal and other personal relationships. We focus in particular on the formal ties between princes and nobles in relation to the build-up of princely hosts, and on the ways in which these ties developed and changed. These relationships, both feudal and non-feudal, have previously been studied only in part (in the case of fief- rentes, for example)6 or in the context of particular military conflicts.7 In looking at the full gamut of these relationships and at their evolution across an entire century, this article also contributes to the wider debate about the military position of the nobility in the Low Countries and 4. J.F. Verbruggen, Het leger en de vloot van de graven van Vlaanderen vanaf het ontstaan tot in 1305 (Brussels, 1960), pp. 72–4. 5. The picture is made richer by consideration of the role of towns, but space is lacking here to elaborate on that. In short: towns were not only important princely strongholds, but also functioned as a reservoir for the recruitment of men for military operations. In these territories, knighthood did not have an exclusively rural character; many members of the urban elites were also knighted and played political and military roles in both the town and the princely entourage. For Brabant, see P. Charruadas, ‘La Genèse de l’aristocratie urbaine à Bruxelles au miroir de l’historiographie italienne (XIIe–XIVe siècles): Entre service militaire à cheval et activités civiles lucratives’, Histoire urbaine, xxi (2008), pp. 49–68, esp. 59–61; M. Damen, ‘Patricians, Knights or Nobles? Historiography and Social Status in Late Medieval Antwerp’, The Medieval Low Countries, i (2014), pp. 173–203; id., ‘The Knighthood in and around Late Medieval Brussels’, Journal of Medieval History, xliii (2017), pp. 255–284. For Flanders, see F. Buylaert, Eeuwen van ambitie: De adel in laatmiddeleeuws Vlaanderen (Brussels, 2010), pp. 259–66; id., ‘La “Noblesse urbaine” à Bruges (1363–1563): Naissance d’un nouveau groupe social?’, in T. Dutour, ed., Les Nobles et la ville dans l’espace francophone, XIIe–XVIe siècles (Paris, 2010), pp. 247–75. For Zeeland, A. van Steensel, Edelen in Zeeland: Macht, rijkdom en status in een laatmiddeleeuwse samenleving (Hilversum, 2010), pp. 312–18; id., ‘Noblemen in an Urbanised Society: Zeeland and its Nobility in the Late Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, xxxviii (2012), pp. 76–99. 6. B.D. Lyon, From Fief to Indenture: The Transition from Feudal to Non-Feudal Contract in Western Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1957). 7. See, for example, Boffa, Warfare in Medieval Brabant, and A. Janse, Grenzen aan de macht: De Friese oorlog van de graven van Holland omstreeks 1400 (The Hague, 1993). EHR, CXXXIII. 563 (August 2018) FEUDAL OBLIGATION OR PAID SERVICE? 779 the nature of their relationship with the princes.